Setting as Character By Ashley Tate

 Although I am a writer (and a soon to be published author!), I consider myself a reader first and foremost; starting as a child when I’d read from sunup to sundown, and whenever I can squeeze a book in now. And as an avid reader and lover of storytelling, I want to be pulled into a book from the outset; I want to become so immersed in the pages that everything else slips away. Reading is my absolute favourite thing to do—imagine! You can fall in love, be horrified, be inspired all from the comfort of your couch or bed—but it also serves as a great escape from reality. Nothing pulls me out of the stresses and anxieties of the real world (of which there are many, especially in the last handful of years) like getting lost in a good book. And I think that one of the best ways to ensure that a reader is hooked (whether that’s me reading or someone reading my book) is with setting. So, it’s probably no surprise then, that creating and crafting setting is my favourite part of the entire writing process.

I treat setting as though it’s just as important as the plot and characters and structure—this is how I ensure my sense of place and world building leaps directly off the page to pull my reader all the way in. In this way setting can become a character in its own right. A city or town or planet or dystopian hell-scape on a far-away star that can live and breathe and be its own multi-dimensional character.

Some authors prefer to write about places and locations that exist in the world, but I prefer fictionalizing them, so that my reader can picture themselves being dropped right there without any preconceived idea of what the place is really like. My debut thriller, Twenty-Seven Minutes, takes place in fictional West Wilmer, a small rural town that could be found anywhere in North America. The kind of town that everyone knows; surrounded by a patchwork of razed fields, a long dusty highway, and rusting water tower. A town where there’s one Main Street and one local bar, in the case of my debut this bar is Flo’s, and where everyone knows everyone else and has for generations; where no one really leaves, where the secrets linger within the town’s borders and gossip can take on an insidious life of its own.

When crafting my setting, I want the reader to feel it and smell it and live in it for the duration of the story. To that end, setting is one of the first parts of my writing process—where do I want this story to take place? When? How? Further: How can this small fictional town of West Wilmer help tell the story of its characters? And as a thriller writer, how can it help add tension for the reader?

Twenty-Seven Minutes is a thriller about the transformative nature of grief and what happens when long-standing secrets become impossible to keep buried. The decision to set this in a small town meant that I could draw on the aspects of one—how close-knit communities can sometimes feel claustrophobic (adding tension to the story), how everyone knows everyone’s business (making it hard to hide from your past) and how those hard-to-hide secrets can weigh so heavily on someone that they begin to unravel (adding more tension and a propulsive sense of a ticking clock) for the reader.

The irony here is that I grew up in the middle of a very large, very busy city. But I spent many childhood summers on the farm where my mother grew up, in a rural town on the East coast of Canada. During those idyllic summers, I learned to swim in the Ocean, hang laundry on a clothes’ line, eat vegetables pulled directly from the garden, borrow books from the Book-Mobile that would rumble by the old farmhouse, and hear nothing at night but crickets, and nothing in the morning but crows. I learned the art of “visiting” neighbours, and the smell of barns and old churches and the joy of pulling into the parking lot of an ice-cream bar on the side of the highway (trust me, nothing tastes as good as when it comes from a bored teenager behind a splintered wooden counter).

As writers, we must be keenly observant and attuned to noticing even the tiniest of details—this is how we add layers of reality to our stories, how our characters come alive, and in terms of setting, how readers can really feel themselves in that place—and it was that incredibly stark contrast of those quiet rural summers spent on the farm, to my loud and busy and boisterous city life, that made such an impression on me during those formative and impressionable years as a wide-eyed young girl, that I fell in love with setting, and especially small towns.

 

Twenty-Seven Minutes by Ashley Tate (Headline, £20)

THE QUESTION- For the last ten years, the small town of West Wilmer has been struggling to answer one question: on the night of the crash that killed his sister, why did it take Grant Dean twenty-seven minutes to call for help? If he'd called sooner, Phoebe might still be alive. THE SECRET - As the anniversary of Phoebe's death approaches, Grant is consumed by his memories and the secret that's been suffocating him for years. But he and Phoebe weren't the only ones in the car that night. Becca was there too - she's the only other person who knows what really happened. Or is she? THE TRUTH - Everyone remembers Phoebe, but local girl June also lost someone that night. Her brother Wyatt has been missing for ten years and, now that her mother is dead, June has no one left - no family, no friends. Until someone appears at her door. Someone who knows what really happened that night. And they are ready to tell the truth?

Ashley Tate can be found on X @tate_ab and on Instagram @ashleytateauthor